When Mayor Brandon Johnson welcomes the Democratic National Convention to Chicago on Monday, his speech should include a warning to fellow Democrats: Don’t govern like me. His 16-month-long tenure as the Windy City’s top boss has been disastrous, but not in the way Republicans who love labeling Chicago a crime-ridden hellhole might think.
Donald Trump and his supporters are sure to blame the left-wing mayor’s radical policies for the city’s woes, but don’t believe the hype. Johnson didn’t defund the police, homicides and violence have been on the decline, and no one in the Loop is overthrowing capitalism. The truth is more mundane: The Johnson administration is like an incompetent non-profit organization that knows how to spend a Fort Knox vault worth of money but has no idea how to manage it or the city’s infrastructure and institutions.
“Some of the best mayors in America have been socialists.”
The GOP would never admit it, but some of the best mayors in America have been socialists. In recent history, Bernie Sanders had a track record as a “pragmatic, hardworking, and effective” mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s. Even better was Daniel Hoan, one of a trio of “Sewer Socialist” mayors (alongside Emil Seidel and Frank Zeidle) who presided over Milwaukee during the first half of the 20th century. Hoan’s incredible popularity in the Wisconsin metropolis—he was elected seven times from 1916 to 1940—wasn’t due to voters’ philosophical sympathy for Marxism-Leninism. His leftism was of a more Midwestern variety, a commitment to ending pay-for-play corruption and getting things done that benefited people.
During Hoan’s two-decade-and-a-half reign, he implemented one of the nation’s first comprehensive zoning systems, improved working conditions for the rank-and-file, reformed the fire and police departments, and built one of the best municipal park systems in the nation. He also funneled resources into public institutions: schools, libraries, and, most famously, the sanitation department (hence the “sewer socialist” pejorative). As Emil Seidel, Milwaukee’s mayor from 1910 to 1912, explained, better sewers were just the tip of the iceberg:
Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers’ homes, but we wanted much, oh, so very much more than sewers. We wanted our workers to have pure air; we wanted them to have sunshine; we wanted planned homes; we wanted living wages; we wanted recreation for young and old; we wanted vocational education; we wanted a chance for every human being to be strong and live a life of happiness. And we wanted everything that was necessary to give them that: playgrounds, parks, lakes, beaches, clean creeks and rivers, swimming and wading pools, social centers, reading rooms, clean fun, music, dance, song, and joy for all. That was our Milwaukee Social Democratic movement.
Good working conditions, good environment, good fun? If that represented socialism, no wonder it was so popular.
The rest of the nation took note of the socialists’ policy accomplishments. Time plastered Hoan on its cover in 1936, saying that “under Mayor Hoan, Milwaukee has grown famed as a paragon of cities,” and the US Conference of Mayors elected him the organization’s president.
For the past half-decade, there’s been some talk of a Sewer Socialist revival in Chicago. Six elected leftist aldermen formed a Socialist Caucus informally in 2019 and then formally in 2021. Then came Johnson, a 47-year-old former Cook County Commissioner and Chicago Teachers Union organizer endorsed by Sanders and the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, who won a surprise victory over former Chicago schools CEO Paul Vallas in April 2023.
The question then was: Would Johnson revive the spirit of the sewer socialists and offer a viable alternative to the corrupt machine politics of the Daley Empire and the austere neoliberalism of Rahm Emanuel? Or would he simply attempt to go the way of Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco and turn policy over to the progressive nonprofit sector?
Thus far, the answer is the latter. There have been a few successes; the plan to reopen shuttered mental health clinics and have social workers rather than the police respond to some 911 calls is smart, as is increasing the city’s minimum wage. Otherwise, his political fumbles have come early and often.
Faced with the arduous challenge of dealing with the tens of thousands of migrants that Texas Governor Greg Abbott bussed to Chicago, he blinked. In December, the city had begun construction on a $65 million tent city designed to hold 2,000 asylum seekers on a blighted site on the city’s southwest side. In total, Chicago has spent more than $400 million since late 2022 on housing migrants, including $253 million to a private Kansas company, charging the city $50 per hour for trash runners and $180 an hour for site managers. These policies have been opposed by some working-class residents, especially black, Latino, and Asian Chicagoans, upset that the city was spending hundreds of millions on recently arrived asylum seekers rather than long-term residents.
Then, despite the mayor’s office’s insistence that the site was safe from pollutants, Governor J.B. Pritzker shut the project down after the Illinois EPA reviewed the city’s report and discovered higher-than-expected levels of mercury and other toxins. The bill for the city’s homeless services also keeps spiraling upward. Johnson asked Chicago to cover the growing bill with a new “mansion tax” (additional taxes on property valued at $1 million or more), but voters rejected it in March.
Other unforced errors are too many to count: the Johnson administration’s lack of transparency, evasive and undercooked answers to the news media, and poor handling of personnel and city employees. Subway and bus services have deteriorated to the point that Pritzker and more than half of the City Council have lobbied for the ouster of Chicago Transit Authority president Dorval Carter for months, but Johnson has stuck by him. In May, Johnson flip-flopped on his promise to cancel a contract with gunshot detection tech provider ShotSpotter. But he announced a deal to extend a contract with ShotSpotter before actually signing it, which cost the city an additional $4.2 million.
Chicago union representative Bob Chianelli cited Johnson’s $30,000 spent on hair and makeup while bashing the mayor in June for neglecting to act on $3 million of under and overpayments to city workers first discovered in January. “I’ve been doing this for a very long time, through a lot of administrations; I’ve never seen anything like this. This is a total disaster.”
Even the city’s sewers and underground pipes are in bad shape. So, unfortunately, Johnson is decidedly not the second coming of Daniel Hoan. His most legitimate claim to sewer socialism? He’s a socialist who owed $3,300 in delinquent sewer and water bills until days before he was elected mayor.
It isn’t just a bad look; it is a repudiation of progressive governance.